An Instagram Selfie Helped Scientists Find a Giant Water Lily

In 2021, Jeremiah Harris went for a swim in a remote Colombian rainforest and took a selfie with some enormous floating leaves. He posted the photo to Instagram, assuming the plants were a well-known species. Five years later, that casual post has helped scientists describe a Giant Water Lily previously unknown to science — a plant so huge its pads can be seen from space, and so rare that only dozens of individuals are thought to exist in the wild.

The plant has been named Victoria colombiana in a paper published in the journal Phytotaxa in October 2026. It is only the fourth species ever described in the genus Victoria, the group that includes the famous giant Amazon waterlilies whose floating leaves are strong enough to make headlines around the world. That a plant this large went unnoticed by science until now says as much about how little of the planet has been properly explored as it does about the lily itself.

How a Vacation Photo Raised an Expert's Eyebrows

Harris, who runs a carnivorous-plant nursery in Colorado Springs, had been visiting the Inírida region of eastern Colombia to study carnivorous plants with fellow enthusiasts. On a bonus day at the end of the trip, he swam among the giant lilies, snapped a selfie, and shared it online, as reported by PetaPixel in its account of the discovery. He figured the plants were Victoria amazonica, the species everyone knows.

Carlos Magdalena, a waterlily specialist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, happened to see the photo while scrolling. Something was wrong. Magdalena had spent more than two decades studying the Victoria genus, and he knew that the species Harris had named does not grow anywhere near that river basin. The waterway in the photo drains into the Orinoco watershed, not the Amazon. If the location on the post was accurate, the plant in the frame had to be something else — possibly a species unknown to science.

Magdalena cross-referenced the post's location against satellite imagery and confirmed that Victoria-type plants were indeed growing in the area. Harris confirmed the satellite images matched the spot he had visited. From there, Magdalena began coordinating with Mauricio Bernal-Rodriguez, a researcher at Bogotá's botanical garden, and with members of Indigenous communities in the region. According to Tech Times, it took nearly two years before a field expedition became possible.

A Five-Day Hunt Through Flooded Forest

The expedition itself sounds like the plot of an adventure film. Over five days in the flooded rainforest, the team located seven plants across two lakes, according to My Modern Met. There was a problem, though: botanists need a flowering specimen to examine the key features that separate one species from another, and none of the plants they found at first were in bloom.

The breakthrough came with help from Gustavo Melo, a boatman from the Tucano Indigenous community, who guided the researchers to a secluded lake where five more plants were growing — including one in flower. The team made a dramatic push by boat in the middle of the night to reach it, a 1 a.m. race against time through the flooded forest, as described in coverage of the find. The type specimen was later collected in Cejal Lake, inside the El Paujil Indigenous Reserve, and the formal description followed.

The pads of the new Giant Water Lily measure up to two meters across, roughly six and a half feet, putting them among the largest floating leaves on Earth. Maarten Christenhusz, a plant taxonomist and honorary research associate at Kew, described the discovery as jaw-dropping and noted that the pads are so large they can be spotted from orbit — what he called a striking reminder of how much of the planet's life remains unexplored.

Why It Matters: Dozens Left in the Wild

Here is the sobering part. Researchers estimate that between thirty and fifty of these plants exist in the wild, and the team plans to submit the species for a critically endangered listing with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Bogotá's botanical garden intends to establish a new population in a more accessible location within Indigenous territory, and seeds will be collected for cultivation in living collections both in Colombia and at Kew.

The timeline of the find is worth pausing on. A traveler posts a photo in 2021. An expert spots it and starts pulling threads. Satellite images confirm the habitat. A five-day expedition, a midnight boat ride, and a single flowering plant later, science gains a species. The paper naming it arrived in October 2026 — half a decade after a selfie that had not been intended as a scientific record.

There is a direct lesson in that for anyone with a camera roll full of travel photos. Researchers increasingly treat geotagged vacation pictures as an informal survey of the planet's biodiversity, and this is not the first time a tourist's snapshot has rewritten a field guide. Scientists recently described dozens of new deep-sea species off the coast of Argentina, a reminder that the age of discovery is far from over — it is just moving onto new platforms. For more on that underwater haul, see the coverage of the deep-sea species found off Argentina.

And the broader trend is not limited to the ocean. Cities are now planting ultra-dense pocket forests of native species on old parking lots and schoolyards, betting that small, fast-growing groves can cool streets and host wildlife within years. Read about the pocket forests popping up in cities to see the other side of the plant story: not discovering what is out there, but rebuilding it where it was paved over.

As Christenhusz put it, conservation can only protect what science has documented. Thanks to one swimmer's Instagram post, science now knows about one more giant worth saving.